Hebron protocol consolidates occupation
The Massachusetts Daily Collegian
January 28, 1997
Authors: Shyamala Ivatury and Hussein Ibish

Located in the center of the West Bank, the Palestinian city of Al-Khalil remains a focal point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the largest and most important West Bank cities, Al-Khalil has been inhabited by Palestinians for thousands of years and has a population of over 160,000.
Also known as Hebron, this Palestinian city was occupied by Israel during the war of 1967, at a time when Al-Khalil was entirely inhabited by Palestinians. Many Jewish people consider Hebron an important holy site, second only to Jerusalem. The future of this Palestinian city arouses deep passions in the minds of many Zionists. Since 1967, there has been a systematic effort to take-over the city, populate it with Zionist settlers, and incorporate it into Israel. Hence the presence of 400 heavily armed Zionist settlers in AlÐKhalil's center, backed up by thousands of Israeli troops.
Over the years Al-Khalil has regularly caught the attention of the western media as the provocative presence of the settlers has created disturbances in the city, most notably a number of massacres committed by Zionist settler zealots.

The Israeli agreement to transfer authority in all of Al-Khalil to the Palestine National Authority (PNA) was an important aspect of the original Oslo Accords of 1992. But both the Labor and Likud governments refused to honor this agreement, which had supposedly been guaranteed by the United States, to withdraw all Israeli troops from Al-Khalil by March 1996. When Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in June 1996, he unilaterally insisted on a complete renegotiation of all terms of the Hebron provisions of the Oslo Accords.

The previous Labor government's argument in favor of the Oslo redeployments had been that it was more efficient for Israel to govern the West Bank cities "from the outside" by controlling the countryside and the highways, while leaving city policing to a PNA police force.

Netanyahu's Likud party, on the other hand, holds that, on grounds of national morale and religious concerns, keeping complete control of West Bank cities such as Hebron is vital to Israel. Zionists have generally claimed possession of Palestine on the supposition that modern Jews are the descendants of the biblical Hebrews. Hence the Zionist ideology in many cases tends to focus on areas deemed to have had great historical and religious importance during biblical times, including Jerusalem and Hebron. Informed by this "national morale" ideology, Netanyahu insisted on the renegotiation of the Hebron provisions of the Oslo accord, with a specific view to keeping Israeli control of the holy sites, such as the "Tomb of the Patriarchs."

This resulted in the recently renegotiated and reÐsigned "Protocol Concerning the Redeployment in Hebron." The process of renegotiation was deliberately designed to humiliate Mr. Yasser Arafat and the PNA, and reaffirms the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship as that of oppressor and oppressed. It also served to yet again demonstrate the worthlessness of United States "guarantees," especially for Palestinians. The new Protocol extends the radical failure of the Oslo Peace Process insofar as it fails to address the real causes of the conflict: expanding Israeli colonialism and the continuous denial of Palestinian human and national rights.

Zionist Logic and the Hebron Protocol

The Protocol on Hebron is emblematic of the racist logic of Zionism and the unchanged nature of the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis throughout this century. It once again demonstrates the relative value of rights that Zionism assigns to Israelis and Palestinians. The 160,000 indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of Hebron are, under the accord, to be allow a measure of local autonomy in 80 percent of the city. On the other hand, the 400Ðodd heavily armed Zionist settlers, many from New York City, are granted control of 20 percent of the city, including the main market and economic center, the city center, and the important religious sites, holy to both Muslims and Jews. The armed settler's control of the city center is to be backed up by thousands of even more heavily armed Israeli troops. This supremacist calculus, where the illegitimate and illegal activities of 400 Zionist interlopers take extreme precedence over the rights of an overwhelming majority of local Arab inhabitants, is entirely consistent with the historical pattern of Zionist logic.

Among the more notorious antecedents of the Hebron Protocol in this regard is the 1919 Balfour Declaration. In it the 93 percent Palestinian majority was dismissed as "existing nonÐJewish populations in Palestine," with their national rights utterly disregarded in favor of the wishes of a tiny Zionist minority. The same logic applied in 1948 with the establishment of the State of Israel, where the small 25 percent Jewish minority declared Palestine to be a "Jewish State," expelling most of the Palestinian majority to other Arab states or the West Bank and Gaza.

This logic of conquest and displacement also informed the seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Israel immediately annexed East Jerusalem, thereby cutting off Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, of which it had been the cultural and economic heart. The government then instituted an aggressive program to "Judaize" the city by seizing Palestinian land and property and bringing in thousands of European settlers. It need hardly be added that all settlement and annexation of occupied territories is strictly illegal under international law.

Settlements and Permanent Occupation

In the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government began a systematic program to create Zionist settlements in order to consolidate their control of the regions. Settlements such as Ma'aleh Adumim and Ariel posed as suburbs of major cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and Israelis were enticed to move there by extremely generous government subsidies. In many cases these lush green Israeli enclaves enjoyed swimming pools and heavily irrigated lawns while the surrounding Palestinian population remained without sufficient drinking water. These settlements are connected to Israeli cities and each other by a network of JewishÐonly highways, policed by the Israeli army. Together, the settlements and highways serve to carve up all contiguous Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza.

Guided by the logic of Zionism, the purpose of this highway and settlement activity over the past 25 years has been to consolidate permanent Israeli occupation of the territories and ensure that any process such as the Oslo Accords could not lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. As a result, the Oslo process cannot address the issue of Palestinian control over any large contiguous areas which could ultimately serve as the basis for a Palestinian state.

On the contrary, these arrangements provide only for limited PNA autonomy in some city centers, with Israeli troops retaining control of virtually the entire region. In fact the reality is that rather than slowing their colonial policies, since the start of the Oslo process in 1992 Israel has actually increased the number of settlers in the West Bank from 120,000 to 160,000, a 30 percent increase.

Under the logic of Zionism, the Palestinians continue to suffer under brutal occupation and martial law, while Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza live under Israeli civil law, a systematic policy of apartheid.

One of the greatest examples of supremacist logic at work in the West Bank and Gaza is the issue of public lands. Under Israeli apartheid laws, "publicly owned land" can be sold or leased only to those officially deemed "Jewish" by the Israeli state. Over 70 percent of the land in the West Bank is designated "publicly owned land" since it has been seized by Israel. Therefore the over one million Palestinians of the West Bank can, by law, never make use of 70 percent of their land, which is reserved for the 160,000 settlers. These, and so many other crucial, basic issues are not addressed by the Oslo process.

Thus the "Protocol concerning redeployment in Hebron" is a perfect example of the phoney "peace process" at work, a facade designed to provide a cloak of legitimacy whereby Israeli colonialism can continue to consolidate control over the West Bank and Gaza. In the meantime, in AlÐKhalil, the human rights of the 160,000 indigenous Palestinians continue to be sacrificed in the name of the fanatical religious ambitions of the 400 Israeli settlers.

Origins of the Hebron Settlement

On April 12, 1968, shortly after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, Rabbi Moshe Levinger led a group of 32 Jewish families into the Park Hotel in downtown Hebron seeking to take over the city. This initial move to colonize the center of Hebron was in direct defiance of even Israeli government laws and policies. One month later, however, the Israeli government agreed to help the extremists to remain in Hebron and, in 1970, founded the Kiryat Arba settlement on hills overlooking the city.

The settlers project of seizing control of the city center remained on hold until 1979 when, at 3 a.m., Levinger's wife Miriam led a small group of women from Kiryat Arba to a sitÐin a defunct hospital in the center of Hebron. The occupiers of the building were defended from outraged locals by Israeli soldiers and in the subsequent weeks a settler community was established in surrounding buildings. The occupation provided the Israeli government an excuse to insert an "Israeli presence" in Hebron through the settlers. Levinger and his wife, along with many of their followers, are from New York City in the United States.

The Settlers' Supremacist Ideology

These New Yorkers are the leaders of the Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful), an extreme religious Zionist organization whose aim is to rid Hebron, and all of Palestine, of its Arab inhabitants. Gush Emunim is a Messianic group whose ideology has been described by Dr. Israel Shahak as assuming "the imminence of the coming of the Messiah, when the Jews, aided by God, will triumph over the Gentiles." According to Gush Emunim leader Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, because of the "eternal uniqueness" of the Jewish people, "while God requires other normal nations to abide by abstract codes of 'justice and righteousness,' such laws do not apply to Jews."

Given their supremacist ideology, it is not surprising that the Hebron settlers have been prone to extreme levels of brutality and violence against Palestinians. In 1988 Rabbi Levinger himself went on a shooting rampage in Hebron center when fed-up Palestinian youths stoned his car. The Rabbi ran through the central market screaming "you are all dogs," and shooting indiscriminately at the unarmed civilians around him, murdering a Palestinian shoe store owner. He was sentenced by Israeli courts to a mere five months in prison for this murder and served only three. In a provocation typical of the attitude and behavior of the Hebron settlers, Levinger, was hailed as a hero and carried to prison through the streets of central Hebron on the shoulders of his gun-totting followers.

In 1996, this same central market was the site of another indiscriminate Zionist shooting spree, this time by an on-duty Israeli soldier, Noam Friedman. In an interview with Israeli television, an unrepentant and unapologetic Friedman said that all Palestinians, women and children included, are "not innocent. They hate the Jews." In 1994, another Hebron settler and extremist from New York, Baruch Goldstein, gunned down dozens of worshippers as they prayed at the Ibrahimi mosque in the "Tomb of the Patriarchs" in Hebron. Goldstein was hailed as a brave hero by the Hebron and Kiryat Arba settlers, and his grave has become a shrine for such extremists. At his funeral it was said by a supportive rabbi that 1000 Arabs were not worth one of Goldstein's fingernails.

The Gush Emunim ideology holds these individuals blameless for their murderous crimes. Rabbi Israel Ariel states, for example, that "a Jew who kills a non-Jew is exempt from human judgement, and has not violated the prohibition of murder." Dr. Shahak notes that "the Gush Emunim rabbis have indeed reiterated that Jews who kill Arabs should be free from all punishment."

In fact, the Gush Emunim leadership founded a terrorist organization in the early 1980s dedicated to attacking Palestinians civilians and elected officials. Moreover, they attempted to blowÐup the Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem. According to a report by Daniel BenÐSimon in the well known Israeli newspaper Davar, the Gush Emunim plotters hoped to provoke a world war by enraging hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world. It was hoped that war on such a scale would rid the world of Muslims and pave the way towards the coming of the Messiah.

Rabbi Eliezar Waldman, former Knesset member and director of main yeshiva at Kiryat Arba has stated that "by fighting the Arabs, Israel carries out its divine mission to serve as the heart of the world," and has referred to Arab hostility to Zionism as resulting from a desire "to fulfill their collective deathÐwish." It is these murderous, fanatical racists whose interests the Israeli and United States governments protect and promote at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians inhabitants of Hebron.

Gush Emunim, unlike Meir Kahane's Kach group, is not outside the mainstream of Israeli politics. Since its inception, Gush Emunim has enjoyed the support of many important Israeli politicians both in Labor and Likud. According to Dr. Shahak, "Gush Emunim's leaders enjoy Rabin's friendship and strong influence in wide circles of the Israeli and diaspora Jewish circles." Labor leaders such David BenÐ Gurion, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin supported the settlement efforts of Gush Emunim and Labor governments played a crucial role in the creation and expansion of the settlements. However Gush Emunim is closer to Likud and, at present, parties closely linked to it are heavily represented in the current Netanyahu cabinet. Gush Emunim activities depend upon material support from the United States. Their fund raising organization, The Hebron Fund, Inc., was incorporated in New York City in 1982 as a "charitable, taxÐexempt foundation" dedicated to turning "the center of Hebron into a Jewish city." The Fund receives generous contributions from a number of extremely wealthy North Americans such as Dr. Irving Moskowitz, and the Reichmann brothers, real estate magnets worth more than $9 billion. It is extraordinary that this kind of hateful organization receives such widespread support, and is allowed to provide a tax shelter for wealthy people whose "generous donations" will be paid for by ordinary citizens.

It is a particular irony that the people of one of the poorest and most oppressed cities in the world, Hebron, should be assaulted in this manner by settlers and their backers from the one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful cities, New York City. As Miriam Levinger told a New York fundraising meeting of The Hebron Fund, Inc., "I grew up in the East Bronx and I was a very frightened Jewish child. And I see my children - they way they walk around Hebron, 40 or 50 families in a city of 70,000 Arabs, and not so friendly Arabs at that - and they walk around as if they own the market."

Despite the hoopla, lies, and pretenses, the Hebron Protocol in no way removes the specter of Zionist colonization from the streets of Al-Khalil. The Protocol, like the rest of the Oslo process, cannot achieve its stated aim of creating a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it does not address the basic issues that cause the conflict and fails entirely to provide Palestinians with the basic human and national rights of which they have been for so long deprived. Furthermore, as the Hebron Protocol starkly demonstrates, there is no new relationship between Israelis and Palestinians in this "era of peace," but rather a continuation and refinement of the traditional oppressive interaction between colonizer and colonized.
Israeli society continues to be guided by a deeply racist ideology. The Gush Emunim Hebron settlers are an extreme but integral part of the Israeli body politic. And until the Israelis can come to understand that Palestinians are human beings with the same rights as anyone else, there can be no peace in Hebron, in Palestine, or the Middle East in general.

Shyamala Ivatury and Hussein Ibish are Collegian columnists.